The Trouble with Lecturing New Supervisors
Part 2 of 4 in the series Training new supervisors with Logic Puzzles for Managers, Volume 1
The trouble with lecturing new supervisors
I've stood at the front of a lot of training rooms, and a room full of new supervisors is one of the hardest audiences there is. Some of them were promoted last Friday and some have been supervising for ten years without help. The senior supervisors, understandably, don’t agree they need to be there. Several of them now supervise people who were their peers a month ago, and they're carrying that awkwardness into the room. They've just been given authority they don't fully trust, and they're being asked to sit still while someone explains how to use it.
The lecture format struggles with that audience for several reasons. The first is relevance. A new supervisor wants to know what to do about Tuesday's problem, the crew member who's late every Monday or the two senior people who won't speak to each other, and a presentation on leadership principles asks them to make that translation on their own. Most won't do it in the moment, and they won't do it later either, because the crew will be waiting.
The second reason is participation. In any discussion that follows a lecture, the most confident person in the room talks first and longest. The quieter supervisors, who are often the more careful thinkers, defer, and the trainer reads their silence as agreement. Case discussions have the same weakness. When there's no wrong answer, the conversation drifts toward opinion, and the loudest opinion wins.
The third reason is memory. Hermann Ebbinghaus first charted how quickly people forget newly learned material in 1885, and Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros replicated his experiment in 2015 with results very close to the original, including the steep loss in the first hours and days after learning.1 That steep early loss is the reason a two-day program delivered once, with nothing afterward, leaves so little behind. Learning that isn't retrieved and used soon after the session fades quickly, whatever the format of the session was.
The fourth reason is transfer, and it matters more than the other three. Alan Saks and Monica Belcourt surveyed members of a training and development association about how much training content employees in their organizations applied on the job. Respondents estimated that 62 percent of employees applied what they learned immediately after training, 44 percent after six months and 34 percent after one year.2 Those figures are practitioner estimates rather than test results, but they describe what every trainer has seen. Using the from and to figures, application fell by 45 percent over the year, from 62 percent to 34 percent. Saks and Belcourt also found that activities before and after the training event, such as supervisor involvement and follow-up, were associated with higher transfer, which points to the design of the whole program rather than the quality of the lecture.
What the research says about retention and application
Most people who've attended a train-the-trainer course have seen the learning pyramid. It claims that people retain 5 percent of what they hear in a lecture, 10 percent of what they read, 50 percent of what they discuss, 75 percent of what they practice and 90 percent of what they teach to others. The figures are tidy and easy to remember, and they've been attributed for decades to the NTL Institute in Bethel, Maine. They also have no traceable research behind them. Kåre Letrud examined the model in 2012 and reported that NTL itself acknowledged it could no longer find the original research that supports the numbers.3 Letrud concluded that the pyramid merged a misreading of Edgar Dale's cone of experience with a retention chart of unknown origin, and he called for its retraction.3 I'd encourage anyone who quotes it in a proposal to stop. A buyer who checks will find the same thing Letrud found.
The research that does exist is more useful, because it measures real outcomes under controlled comparisons. The largest body of evidence on lecture versus active learning comes from university science, engineering and mathematics courses. Scott Freeman and six colleagues analyzed 225 studies that compared traditional lecturing with active learning and found that exam scores rose by about 6 percent under active learning, while students in traditionally lectured classes were 1.5 times more likely to fail.4 The effects held across disciplines and were strongest in classes of 50 or fewer, which is roughly the size of a supervisor cohort.
Workplace research points the same way. Michael Burke and colleagues analyzed 95 studies of worker safety and health training covering 20,991 participants, and sorted the training methods by how much they engaged the learner. The least engaging methods were lectures, videos and pamphlets; the most engaging were behavioral modeling and hands-on training. The most engaging methods were, on average, about three times as effective as the least engaging in producing knowledge and skill acquisition, and they were also more effective at reducing accidents, illnesses and injuries.5 The authors concluded that training involving behavioral modeling, a substantial amount of practice and dialogue generally outperforms other methods.5 That study matters for supervisors because it connects the training method to a hard operating outcome as well as to a test score.
The fair reading of the research includes a defense of the lecture. Winfred Arthur Jr. and colleagues analyzed 162 studies of organizational training and found medium to large effects overall, with effect sizes of about 0.60 to 0.63 across reaction, learning, behavior and results criteria.6 They singled out the lecture as a noteworthy result: contrary to its reputation as boring and ineffective, it produced robust effects for several types of skills and tasks.6 A well-built lecture can teach concepts. It just can't, by itself, give people the practice of applying those concepts with others watching and correcting them.
The most direct evidence for supervisor and leadership training comes from Christina Lacerenza and colleagues, who analyzed 335 independent samples of leadership training using only employee data.7 They found that leadership training improved reactions, learning, transfer to the job and organizational results, with effect sizes of 0.63, 0.73, 0.82 and 0.72 respectively, which is substantially more effective than earlier estimates had suggested.7 The design features associated with the strongest results were a needs analysis, feedback, multiple delivery methods (practice especially), spaced sessions rather than one massed session, on-site delivery and face-to-face instruction that isn't self-administered.7 That list reads almost like a specification for the method described in the third posting in this series.
Team building has its own research base, and it's narrower than its marketing suggests. Cameron Klein and colleagues updated an earlier meta-analysis and found that team building has a positive, moderate effect across team outcomes, with the strongest effects on affective outcomes such as trust and cohesion and on process outcomes such as coordination.8 The four components they examined were goal setting, interpersonal relations, problem solving and role clarification, which are the building blocks most team-building workshops draw on. Team building helps teams work together better. On its own, it isn't designed to teach a supervisor how to assign work or deliver feedback, and the research doesn't claim that it does.
Here's what I take from all of this. Lecture can transfer knowledge, and active, practice-based training transfers more of it, keeps more of it and moves more of it onto the job. The gains are largest when practice is structured, feedback is immediate, sessions are spaced and the content is tied to the participant's real work. A training method for new supervisors should be judged against those conditions, and that's the standard I used when I built the puzzles.
Notes
1. Jaap M. J. Murre and Joeri Dros, "Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve," PLOS ONE 10, no. 7 (2015): e0120644, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0120644.
2. Alan M. Saks and Monica Belcourt, "An Investigation of Training Activities and Transfer of Training in Organizations," Human Resource Management 45, no. 4 (2006): 629 to 48, https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.20135.
3. Kåre Letrud, "A Rebuttal of NTL Institute's Learning Pyramid," Education 133, no. 1 (2012): 117 to 24.
4. Scott Freeman et al., "Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 23 (2014): 8410 to 15, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111.
5. Michael J. Burke et al., "Relative Effectiveness of Worker Safety and Health Training Methods," American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 2 (2006): 315 to 24.
6. Winfred Arthur Jr. et al., "Effectiveness of Training in Organizations: A Meta-Analysis of Design and Evaluation Features," Journal of Applied Psychology 88, no. 2 (2003): 234 to 45.
7. Christina N. Lacerenza et al., "Leadership Training Design, Delivery, and Implementation: A Meta-Analysis," Journal of Applied Psychology 102, no. 12 (2017): 1686 to 1718, https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000241.
8. Cameron Klein et al., "Does Team Building Work?," Small Group Research 40, no. 2 (2009): 181 to 222, https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408328821.
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